It is sunday. I am about to start my journey of about 9 hours to Vienna, the capital of Austria in my former home country. I choosed to apply for an internship in Vienna because of different reasons. At first I thought that I wasn’t interested about going to Africa where a lot of my fellow students are right now. I wanted to go to Australia, or USA. But though of my big commitment to our nursing-student-movement in Calmare I didn’t have much time or energy to apply to the big cities in the world for an internship. I do not feel that this is an disadvantage though, because I now would live at my mothers apartment for 5 weeks for my internship in Vienna. (My mum lives outside of Vienna, about 30 minutes from the hospital).
All started one evening where I told my boyfriend Emil about the idea to do an internship in abroad. We had a discussion one evening and I talked about Austria and how convenient it would be to live at my mums and it wouldn’t be far to travel either. At that point I had looked up a hospital on the internet which was the biggest medstudents-university at least in Europe, I read (I am not totally sure about that, but I read it somewhere…). He thought it would be a great idea and so I started the process of applying. I went to the homepage of the hospital (http://www.akhwien.at) and applied for an internship. The hospital answered me and told me how I should apply and wanted med to choose which part of the hospital I would like to have an internship at. So there I was, I had to choose between all of this:
Clinical Structure
Clinics
- Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine
- Department of Ophthalmology and Optometrics
- Department of Blood Group Serology and Transfusion Medicine
- Department of Surgery
- Department of Dermatology
- Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology
- Department of Medicine I
- Department of Medicine II
- Division of Angiology
- Division of Cardiology
- Division of Pulmonology
- Department of Medicine III
- Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine
- Division of Neonatology, Intensive Care Medicine and Neuropediatrics
- Division of Pediatric Cardiology
- Division of Pediatric Nephrology and Gastroenterology
- Division of Pediatric Pulmonology, Allergology and Endocrinology
- Division of Pediatrics with special focus on Pediatric Hemotology-Oncology (St. Anna Children’s Hospital)
- Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
- Department of Clinical Pharmacology
- Department of Hospital Epidemiology and Infection Control
- Department of Oral, Maxillary and Facial Surgery
- Department of Neurosurgery
- Department of Neurology
- Department of Emergency Medicine
- Department of Orthopedics
- Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
- Department of Psychiatry and Pychotherapy
- Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
- Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy
- Department of Radiotherapy
- Department of Trauma-Surgery
- Department of Urology
Clinical Institutes
- Department of Laboratory Medicine
- Division of Clinical Microbiology
- Division of Clinical Virology
- Division of Medical-Chemical Laboratory Diagnostics
- Institute of Neurology
- Department of Pathology
- Department of Biomedical Research
- Department of Medical Education
- Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering
- Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics and Intelligent Systems
- Institute of Pathophysiology and Allergy Research
So I went trough all the descriptions of the different wards, because there where a lot of them I had never hear of here in Sweden. After a while I found a field that caught my attention: organ transplant. I thought I would gain the most of my internship abroad if I choose a subject I had not heard about very much before and which wasn’t much established here in Sweden and especially not in Calmar. Calmar is a little city compared to the rest of Sweden and in the hospital in Calmare they don’t transplant organs currently. My second choice went to the psyatric ward, though I am really interested to know how they work with different diagnoses in Vienna. But that may be something I can look in later in my life – one step at the time.
So, here I am. Starting my journey to the most beautiful city in the world, they say, Vienna!
With tears in my eyes but hope in my heart I left Emil, my boyfriend, and Lovely, my horse – my little family would have to take care of Sweden without me the next 5 weeks.
I “suited up” in my new skiing-jacket in perfect match to the train.
Though most of my classmates toasted themselves for a long journey at the airport, I bought myself a glass of wine to celebrate that I finally headed to Vienna. Cheers!
“Auf wiedersehen” – Means: See you soon in Austrian. It is a common frase people in Austria use to say good bye.